[Geee]

I wouldn't be surprised if they pulled out a high-performance ARM chip (more cores) to completely replace x86. Someone's got to do it, right? Windows 8 is also headed in this direction with support for both ARM and x86, but all current ARM-chips are low-power low-performance and can't compete with x86.

[skimbrel]

We can only hope. x86 has so much backwards-compatibility baggage at this point — it’s too complex for its own good and all that extra silicon is just a power drain.

[wanorris]

It's worth remembering that this has traditionally been offset by the fact that x86 chips are manufactured in such epic volumes and on such advanced processes that there was no way for more "efficient" silicon to dislodge it.

And unlike the transition from Power chips to x86, ARM won't be so much faster that something like Rosetta will be a workable transition solution for real applications -- effectively everything will have to be ported, or it won't work.

The epic volumes of ARM chips make it possible to overcome the manufacturing and scale issues, but doing complex super-custom ARM chips for PCs drops the chips back out of the mass market again unless an enormous number of PCs get converted all at once -- though this is something Apple is capable of.

Overall, there are enough logistic issues involved that I'm not convinced that ARM is the future of PCs unless the current ARM devices like iPads and Android tablets grow up to be our PCs of the future.

[loup-vaillant]

While we're at it, why not jettison the whole paradigm, and start over? ARM itself is getting quite complicated, and there are ideas to be picked from, say, the B5000, or Transmeta.